bon jour~

So I mentioned in my previous post that I saw Julie & Julia. I actually went to the Borders next to the movie theatre to see what "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" looked like. I found two copies - one is a reprint of the original while the other is one based on the movie (cover wise. The inside is exactly the same). The reprint comes in two volumes and is $20 while the movie one is a one fat book that contains both volumes with better quality paper for $40. Me being the cheapass that I am could not fathom handing over $40 of my hard earned money for a book that I could just as easily buy for $20. I will admit, the reprint is rather tacky. The cover looks like a really old wallpaper. But who cares, right? As long as the innards are goood.

I was able to make two recipes from the book so far. The first one, which I ended up making 3 times actually lol, was a simple butter spongecake. Fucking delicious. Instead of using baking powder (or soda?) I was to use egg whites whipped to a stiff peak to make the cake rise but thhis also made it extremely airy and light.. hence the sponge part of the cake. Right out of the oven was heaven in my mouth: light, eggy, slightly sweet and butter. I love you butter spongecake.

The second recipe I made was beef bourginon (I know I spelled it wrong. My bad.). It's basically a beef stew with a lot of red wine. I never made it before so this was my first time. It takes A LOT of prep work and cooking time (2.5-3 hours in the oven!) but i don't know if it was worth it. I mean, it tastes pretty good but since I've never made it before I had nothing to compare the taste too. The taste.. it was very.. savory. Lol, best way I could describe it. I'm sure if I had used a better quality wine and beef, it would taste differently better. This is definitely the kind of food I would like to eat in the middle of an uber cold winter.

Sorry for the wall of text but I'm really excited about cooking more stuff from Julia's book. Next on the list for me is a fresh strawberry tart.